Epos: Gustav Mahler in New York

Additional Details

Gustav Mahler in New York
Mahler in New York

The 17th EpOS Film Festival

USA, 2026 / English, Hebrew subtitles / 93 minutes
Directed by: Hilan Warshaw

Gustav Mahler arrives in New York in 1907, a refugee from antisemitism and a personal crisis, seeking to find a new spiritual home there. For a time, he conducts the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, and also composes his final two symphonies in the city.

But the four years the Austrian-Jewish composer spends in New York are bleak ones, and the film reveals them in depth through letters he wrote to friends and letters his wife Alma wrote. Throughout the film, Mahler’s magnificent music plays—from his symphonies to songs he composed for Alma—and against this backdrop we discover that he lost his job after conductor Arturo Toscanini arrived in New York, that he struggled with an illness eating away at his body, and that he experienced profound psychological suffering in his relationship with his brilliant and ambitious wife, who was unfaithful to him.

Four years after arriving in New York, Mahler asked to return to his hometown of Vienna. He died there in 1911 and was buried, at his request, beside his daughter, who had died in childhood.